Archives at Zinester: Conspiracy Journal. Conspiracy Journal. Science & Technology

NEW MYSTERIES MAGAZINE - ISSUE #11 ON SALE NOW!

IN THIS ISSUE
Psychic Archaeology and the Glastonbury Scripts

Automatic Writing and the Fluid Pen of
Patience Worth

The Enduring Enigma of the Hope Diamond

Kenny Kingston: Proving the Test of Time

Florida's Mysterious Coral Castle

- PLUS -
CIA Sculpture Continues to Baffle Cryptographers
UFOs: Creatures of the Sky?
Tests End Tut's Murder Mystery
Ontario, Canada's Haunted Cliff of Ekateniondi

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~

- HELLO CENTRAL, GET ME GANYMEDES DEPARTMENT -

The "Wow!" Signal

It's no rare occurrence in science fiction: The introverted researcher working the graveyard shift at a SETI radio observatory jumps out of his seat in surprise when the red light blinks on the control panel. "We're getting a signal!" he shouts into a phone as needles dance across paper chart recorders, and scientists rapidly converge on the scene. At some point someone yells, "Get me the President!" at the person whose job it is to get presidents.

On August 15th, 1977, such a signal was received at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio, though the ensuing drama was considerably more subdued. The volunteer who spotted the pattern on the paper logs circled the data and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. The radio telescope was observing space as part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, and it was the most compelling signal the receiver had recorded in its fourteen years of operation. It was powerful enough to push the Big Ear's monitoring device off the charts.

The signal came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and lasted seventy-two seconds at about 1420.456 MHz before it faded away. The volunteer who found and circled the data in the paper printout was Jerry Ehman, who was amazed at the signal's intensity and what a narrow range of frequencies it appeared in. Seventy-two seconds also happened to be the exact length of time it would take for the Earth to rotate the Big Ear through a signal from space. He did some analysis of the data, and by all indications this powerful, narrowband radio signal was from outside of our solar system. But was it sent by an advanced civilization?

Curiously, the signal was picked up by only one of the scope's two detectors. When the second detector covered the same patch of sky three minutes later, it heard nothing. This indicated either the unlikely possibility that the first beam had detected something that wasn't there, or that the source of the signal had been shut off or redirected in the intervening time. The observatory researchers trained their massive scope on that part of the sky for a full month, watching closely for a repeat of the mysterious signal. Nothing interesting was observed during those thirty days, yet scientists were at a loss for an explanation of the original event. Planning to return to that patch of sky periodically, the Big Ear continued its broader purpose.

Several times over the next twenty years, longtime SETI researcher Robert Gray and his colleague Kevin B. Marvel arranged for further scans of that region of space. They managed to obtain some time on the META array at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, and the extremely sensitive Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which is made up of twenty-seven 25-meter radio dishes. They detected some extremely faint sources of radio emissions in the infamous patch of sky, but nothing like that of the "Wow!" signal.

However their findings did essentially disprove the only working theory as to the cause of the original event: "interstellar scintillation." It was thought that perhaps some weaker radio signal from space had been temporarily focused on the Big Ear in a way similar to stars twinkling??¦ but the VLA is sensitive enough that it would have detected such a source, and it did not.

The Big Ear maintained its periodic scan of that part of space for almost forty years, and never again came across such a compelling signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make way for a golf course.

"Wow" remains the strongest and clearest signal ever received from an unknown source in space, as well as the most fascinating and unexplainable. The signal's original discoverer Jerry Ehman doesn't care to speculate on its source, and he remains scientifically skeptical. "Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal," he said in an interview, "they'd do it far more than once. We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times."

Perhaps. But consider that when humankind used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message out into space in 1974, it was only sent once.

Source: Damn Interesting
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=318#more-318

- MYSTERIES OF OUR PAST DEPARTMENT -

Alien Skies

Two Voyager spacecraft are carrying a message from the human race to the remote future, somewhere in the distant stars. Our faint hope is that some other life form will find one of those spacecraft and decipher its cryptic hieroglyphs. If so, we will have established contact with other intelligent life in the universe!

In a similar way, our ancestors have sent us not one, but thousands, of important messages in the form of legends and art from our remote, alien past. Like the Voyager message, they require intelligence to decode. Do we have that intelligence? Surprisingly, until the last half of the 20th century, the answer has been no! The problem has been in our human tendency to project our familiar world onto those messages. Intelligent aliens would be better equipped to decode those messages because they would have to make a conscious effort to give up their familiar references in an effort at understanding.

As the comparative mythologist David Talbott has shown, we have simply assumed that the sky we rejoice in is the same as the sky that our long-forgotten ancestors lived beneath. On the other hand, alien investigators would not know whether we had one sun, or two or more, what color those suns were, and whether they rose and set like ours. So, when the ancient peoples from around the world record that the sun remained fixed in position in the sky, the aliens could allow for the possibility that the Earth was in some kind of phase lock with its nearest star. What have we done with similar information? We have discarded it as impossible nonsense.

So our first obstacle has been the intellectual arrogance we bring to our attempts at understanding the stories and images our ancestors considered of utmost importance to be passed on faithfully to future generations. What we fail to understand we have minimized or denigrated. As De Santillana and Von Dechend wrote in Hamlet's Mill - An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth:

"... we almost dare not admit the assumption ... that our ancestors of the high and far-off times were endowed with minds wholly comparable to ours, and were capable of rational processes -always given the means at hand. It is enough to say that this flies in the face of a custom which has become already a second nature.

Our period may some day be called the Darwinian period, just as we talk of the Newtonian period of two centuries ago. The simple idea of evolution, which it is no longer thought necessary to examine, spreads like a tent over all those ages that lead from primitivism into civilization. Gradually, we are told, step by step, men produced the arts and crafts, this and that, until they emerged into the light of history.

Those soporific words "gradually" and "step by step," repeated incessantly, are aimed at covering an ignorance which is both vast and surprising. One should like to inquire: which steps? But then one is lulled, overwhelmed and stupefied by the gradualness of it all, which is at best a platitude, only good for pacifying the mind, since no one is willing to imagine that civilization appeared in a thunderclap."

The use of the word "thunderclap"is remarkably prescient of the authors for it has been established by Talbott, that the over-riding concern of our ancestors was with the actions of the capricious and warring planetary gods. And the weapon of choice was the thunderbolt. It was no earthly spark. It took the strange involuted, corkscrew form of plasmoids and was associated with stones (meteorites) falling from the sky and global devastation.

It is therefore of little wonder that mythic traditions were established in an effort to remind future generations of those terrible experiences. Recent evidence from genetic studies suggests that the human race sprang from a handful of survivors. The question remains - survivors of what? Talbott answers provocatively that we are survivors of the apocalypse; doomsday; the end of the world. It was a time when the planets were not mere specks in the night sky but instead loomed as majestic, sometimes terrifying, spheres in the heavens.

Like me, Talbott received an early intellectual mentoring from that great but unrecognized interdisciplinary scholar of the 20th century, Immanuel Velikovsky. It was he who identified the biologically impossible fire-breathing, flying dragon or serpent as an awe inspiring comet which later settled down to become the planet Venus. Velikovsky alone predicted the intense internal heat of Venus and was further vindicated before his death by the announcement of Venus' "cometary tail" which stretches as far as the Earth's orbit. As space exploration has continued, his ideas of 50 years ago have been confirmed while experts are continually forced back to their drawing boards. If a theory were to be judged by its successful predictions then Velikovsky should have received a Nobel Prize. Instead, academics lashed out with unprecedented fury at someone who would cross their jealously guarded disciplinary boundaries and open doors that they were unaware existed.

The overwhelming desire "not to know" certain things seems to afflict us all. That is particularly true where the safety of our tiny blue spaceship Earth is concerned. It could be that much of modern science is subconsciously aimed at making us feel safe by pushing cataclysmic events into remote times or deep space. Velikovsky suggested that the human race behaves collectively like the victim of a dreadful trauma. The result is a kind of localized amnesia and an unwillingness to confront the painful memory. But until we face and accept our true past we will continue to behave neurotically. Here may lie the key to understanding our insane destructive behaviour toward ourselves and the planet as an unconscious identification with, and re-enactment of, the power of the old planetary gods. Only understanding can bring true healing.

Clearly, astronomers can point to powerful theoretical reasons why the solar system cannot have had a chaotic recent history. However, astronomy is an odd science. While using all of the trappings of 20th century technology, its theory is firmly rooted in gas-light era science. As Velikovsky rightly said, "it is of Victorian vintage". Astrophysicists have not yet discovered the electric light. Nowhere will you find any reference to electrical energy in celestial mechanics. Yet the ancients were adamant, as Heraclitus, ca. 500 B.C., put it: "it is the thunderbolt that steers the universe". Anomalistic behaviour of experiments during solar eclipses show that we do not understand the true nature of gravity. Common sense (which as one wag said, isn't so common) suggests that it is a property associated with the fundamental electrical nature of matter and has nothing to do with empty space.

So, aliens who intercept a Voyager spacecraft should have a clear advantage in deciphering our plaque and recording from the remote past. This is in stark contrast to our difficulty in understanding messages from our own species in the not so distant past. Aliens would not need to impose limits like a planet that has been undisturbed for billions of years, merely to make them feel secure. The chances are that they live in a far more interesting environment anyway, with two or more suns. But they should have no difficulty in visualizing a planet orbiting a gas giant, with other planets looming nearby, and a distant single sun. Nor do we - provided that it is an artist's fancy of an alien planet. Yet this is the kind of message we have been sent from the past!

The aliens won't have to be super intelligent to detect from the Voyager recordings that they are dealing with a damaged species. And when they see that we have not mastered the electrical nature of gravity and resort to primitive rocket engines - maybe they will have discovered homo sapiens ignoramus?

Source: Holoscience
http://www.holoscience.com/views/alien.htm

- WE ARE ALL ONE DEPARTMENT -

The Amazing Holographic Universe

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with evey other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

Source: Crystalinks.com
http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

- A YEAR TO REMEMBER DEPARTMENT -

Was 2005 The Year of Natural Disasters?

Why do natural disasters seem to be increasingly frequent and increasingly deadly? Poor and vulnerable people are usually the worst hit.

Tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes, locusts and now the threat of a flu pandemic. Will 2005 be remembered as the year of natural disasters?

The year 2005 saw the aftermath of the 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami waves in Asia, hurricanes in central and north America, notably Katrina, which triggered flooding in the US city of New Orleans, and the 8 October earthquake in Pakistan and India. The year also saw famine after crops were destroyed by locusts in Niger.

Virtually unnoticed by the outside world was tiny El Salvador where the country??™s highest volcano, Ilamatepec, erupted on 1 October, displacing more than 7500 people and killing two. A few days later Hurricane Stan swept through and killed about 70 people with floods and mudslides.

From January to October 2005, an estimated 97 490 people were killed in disasters globally and 88 117 of them in natural disasters, according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a WHO Collaborating Centre that operates a global disaster database in Belgium. According to CRED, the number of natural disasters ??” floods, windstorms, droughts and geological disasters ??” recorded since 1900 have increased and the number of people affected by such disasters has also increased since 1975.

Is this as bad as it gets, or could it get worse? Why do natural disasters appear to be increasingly frequent and increasingly deadly?

Today??™s disasters stem from a complex mix of factors, including routine climate change, global warming influenced by human behaviour, socioeconomic factors causing poorer people to live in risky areas, and inadequate disaster preparedness and education on the part of governments as well as the general population.

Some disasters experts reject the term ???natural disasters, arguing that there is almost always a man-made element.

???I don??™t like to use the term ???natural disasters??™,??? said Dr Ciro Ugarte, Regional Advisor for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Relief with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington DC, explaining that natural disasters would not have such a devastating effect on people??™s lives if they were not exposed to such risks in the first place.

Natural phenomena do not always generate human disasters. Ugarte noted that in 2005, several earthquakes that struck in South America were of a higher magnitude than the one that devastated northern Pakistan and parts of India in October, but these hit sparsely populated areas and therefore caused less damage. The same goes for several tsunamis in 2005 which were not deemed ???disasters??? because they didn??™t endanger anyone, Ugarte said.

Natural phenomena are likely to affect more people because Earth??™s population has increased. According to the United Nations Population Fund, this stands at about 6.5 billion people and is projected to reach 9.1 billion people in 2050.

Marko Kokic, spokesperson for WHO??™s Health Action in Crisis department, said that some communities are more vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters than 100 years ago because of ecological degradation. He said that, for example, when tropical storms hit the Caribbean in September 2004, there was nothing to stop storm waters gathering and wreaking devastation in Haiti because of deforestation.

???We need to tackle the underlying issues, such as poverty and inequity,??? Kokic said, adding: ???In many countries, people cut down trees because wood is the cheapest fuel???.

Disasters are also a consequence of development and industrialization. In Europe, experts believe that countries such as France and Germany are more adversely affected by floods today because major rivers, such as the Rhine, have been straightened to ease commercial traffic.

Global warming as well as routine, cyclical climate changes are causing a higher number of strong hurricanes in the Caribbean, meteorologists say. Add to that the increasing number of people living in areas such as coastlines, in substandard housing and the destruction in a crisis of essential infrastructure, such as hospitals, and you have the potential for more devastating disasters than a few decades ago.

There have always been disasters. The bubonic plague wiped out more than 25 million people, or 37% of Europe??™s population, in the 1300s. More recently, the 1918??“19 flu pandemic killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide. One of the earliest recorded disasters, the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii killing about 10 000 people. Today, two million people live within its possible range, illustrating one major difference between then and now.

About 75 disasters were reported globally in 1975, according to CRED. In 2000 the figure peaked at 525 and dropped to just under 400 in 2004. By far the highest number of fatalities ??” about 450 000 ??” occurred in 1984. In 2004 nearly 300 000 died in disasters, but the number of people affected has soared since 1975 with about 600 million people affected by disasters of all kinds in 2002.

So complex and intertwined are the factors behind these disasters that some experts believe the most practical approach to preparedness may be to focus on reducing the risks rather than factors behind the risks.

Dave Paul Zervaas, regional coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations??™ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), argued that preparation should focus on making people less vulnerable to disasters.

???We think it??™s much more important now to look at vulnerabilities, because you have factors you can control,??? Zervaas said. ???You can work to lower vulnerability [to disasters].???

Hurricane Katrina in the United States is a good example, Zervaas said. A number of factors contributed to the damage and loss of life. The storm was huge. It struck a city whose levees had not been maintained or strengthened for years, and government agencies??™ response to the emergency was at first inadequate.

In Central America storms such as hurricanes Mitch and Stan have wrought damage with rain and landslides rather than wind. ???The poverty issue and the social inequity situation have not become much better in most places,??? said Zervaas, adding that migration to cities conspires with a lack of urban planning to put people in danger.

Clearly, climate change ??” whether helped by human behaviour or not ??” is playing a role. Hurricane experts say the world is in the midst of a routine, cyclical climate change that causes the Caribbean to heat up, increasing the frequency of powerful storms. The effect of this is greater than that of global warming, according to Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami.

While earthquakes represent some of the most devastating disasters in recent years, these are diminishing in strength compared with earlier times, Ugarte said. Nowadays an earthquake with a magnitude of 8, 9 or 10 on the Richter scale is rare, the one in south Asia in October 2005 was 7.6, Ugarte said, adding: ???But yes, we are seeing a lot of damage. You will probably find more damage in the future for phenomena that are less in magnitude than in previous years.???

Experts agree that the poor are disproportionately hit. ???In several of these countries, the poor people are looking for spaces to build their houses or their communities [and] they find spaces that are not already used,??? Ugarte said. ???And those spaces that are not already used are usually the spaces at higher risk for natural phenomena. There??™s a huge relationship between this kind of damage and poverty.???

For this reason financial services play a role in both prevention, and damage limitation and recovery. A report entitled, Climate change futures: health ecological and economic dimensions, published in November 2005 assesses the risks generated by climate change. One of several scenarios ???would involve blows to the world economy sufficiently severe to cripple the resilience that enables affluent countries to respond to catastrophes,??? according to the report, which was published by the Center for Health and Global Environment at the Harvard Medical School and sponsored by reinsurance company Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. While it is important to encourage people, governments and companies to buy insurance, not everyone can afford it or see the need.

Microfinancing is another avenue, giving poor people the means to improve their economic situation so that a disaster does not hit them as hard as it would otherwise, and also by lending them money to use in recovering from it.

Many countries are working to improve their disaster preparedness, but more needs to be done, Ugarte said.

???Countries are now better prepared in comparison to 1970,??? he said. ???But now the level of preparation and risk reduction that you need is huge in comparison to that year.???

The Michoacan earthquake in Mexico in 1985 showed that being well prepared was not enough because hospitals in the disaster zone were destroyed. Likewise, in Grenada Hurricane Ivan damaged and disrupted much of the Caribbean island??™s health system, making it difficult for health workers to respond to the needs generated by the hurricane.

PAHO has expanded its programmes to focus not only on preparedness but also on mitigation. This involves reducing secondary deaths and destruction that can occur in the aftermath of a disaster, and implementing building codes that require hospitals, schools, military bases other vital structures to be built to withstand such disasters.

Many countries say they can??™t afford more preparation, but some measures are simple and can be inexpensive, such as a tsunami warning system, Ugarte said. ???But from there to Banda Aceh, that is another step,??? Ugarte said, referring to the capital of the Indonesian province that was worst hit by the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004. ???And from Banda Aceh to all the little communities on the coast, that??™s another issue. That last link of the chain is not in place. And that is the system that we need to build.???

Disaster experts say early warning systems and education are essential to prevent and mitigate against the effects of natural disasters. In its World disasters report 2005, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies notes that a simple phone call saved thousands of lives when the giant tsunami waves hit India in 2004. A fisherman??™s son named Vijayakumar Gunasekaran, who lives in Singapore, heard about the tsunami early on the radio and phoned relatives living on the east coast of India. Following his warning, all 3630 residents evacuated their village there before the waves arrived.

Source: The World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/84/1/news10106/en/

- COMPETITION FOR ET DEPARTMENT -

The Peoples Republic of China will give "life-on-other-planet" Canadians a run for their money on pushing the UFO agenda in 2006.

Canada already has a welcoming committee at the ready to establish diplomacy with "ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting earth".

Since 1964, Canada has been home to the world??™s first UFO landing pad in St. Paul, Alberta, a 130-ton concrete structure built as that city??™s Centennial project.

Boasted to be among the famed visitors who dropped by to see the UFO landing pad by its promoters were Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and Mother Teresa.

The Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, presented by NGOs to a Senate Committee panel hearing in Winnipeg on March 10, 2005, proposes that the Government of Canada undertake a `Decade of Contact??™ with extraterrestrials.

The proposed document is "a 10-year process of formal, funded public education, scientific research, educational curricula development and implementation, strategic planning, community activity and public research concerning our terrestrial society??™s full culture, political, social, legal and governmental communication and public interest diplomacy, with advanced, ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting earth."

If the idea of ETs already visiting earth is a mind stretch for some, the Decade of Contact initiative is supported by former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer, among others.

In 1938, an Orson Wells radio program claimed that a real time alien invasion was in progress.

Now that they??™ve got the money, China may get to ETs before Canada ever does.

"Government officials in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province, announced on Tuesday that they had received $20 million from a Taiwan-based company to build a UFO research facility in China." (TCV News, Dec. 11, 2005).

According to TCV News??™ Jim Kouri, the project is a result of several people in the city??™s Baiyun District claiming they were visited by extraterrestrials in 1994. With the new research facility, scientists hope to reproduce the mysterious moment through photos and historical documentation.

"In 1994, more than 27 pine trees in a forest farm in the district mysteriously fell down. However, nearby plastic shelters stood intact.

"A nearby motor vehicle factory reported similar unexplained events: steel pipes were strangely broken; a huge truck was found more than 20 metres away from its original place; and a factory employee claims he was mysteriously pulled up in the air by an "unknown" force."

While some chalk up the mysterious events to ET, scientists stated after a field trip to the locations that thunder, lightning and tornadoes were the probable cause.

Wang Fangchen, a biologist who visited the site right after the event, said the city??™s plan to build a UFO research base is "ridiculous".

"Where do they recruit scientists for the research?" he asked, before adding: "I won??™t oppose it if they just want to promote local tourism through the programme."

Zhou Xiaoqiang, a secretary-general with the Beijing UFO Research Association, said, "People often mistake planes, clouds and insects, as well as strange shadows on photographs, as being UFOs.

"If aliens came, they would more likely appear before our eyes politely than hide themselves, said Xiaoaqing.

On Sept. 22, 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin declared to the UN General Assembly, "Space is our final frontier. It has always captured our imagination. What a tragedy it would be if space became one big weapons arsenal and the scene of a new arms race."

Martin stated, "In 1967, the UN agreed that weapons of mass destruction must not be based in space. The time has come to extend this ban to all weapons??¦"

Meanwhile, the same US detractors, who argue that there never were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, worry about the possibility of stockpiling WMD in outer space.

Source: Canada Free Press
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/cover010206.htm

- WILDMAN OF THE WOODS DEPARTMENT -

KLUANG: It looks human but has fur the shades of dark red and black covering its face and body, stands about 4m tall and lets out a loud roar.

That is how the orang asli villagers from Batu 25, Kampung Punjat Sungai Nadik, in Kahang, about 190km from Johor Baru, described a creature known as siamang or better known as Bigfoot.

One of the villagers supposedly even had a 15-minute standoff with the creature and has stopped going into the jungle alone.

A 40cm to 50cm footprint of the Bigfoot discovered in Mawai, Kota Tinggi, recently. The print was found in mud after a group of workers tracked down the creature to a river.

Recalling his horrifying experience four months ago, Amir Md Ali said he was catching frogs in the Gunung Panti jungles to sell when he stumbled upon the creature.

???I was heading to my favorite spot when I suddenly saw this tall creature about 30m away.

???I was trembling with fear as the creature stared at me,??? he said, adding that he did not move for about 15 minutes.

Amir, who initially thought the creature would leave, decided to run when the creature continued to stare at him.

???I did not look back and continued running until I reached my village,??? he said, showing a clearing in the jungle where the standoff occurred to some 50 people who took part in an expedition to gather information on the Bigfoot sightings in the state.

The one-day expedition, led by Johor National Parks director Hashim Yusof, comprised park officials and press members.

Another villager, Herman Deraman, 21, or better known as Along, had a closer encounter with the creature in the woods.

???I was resting one night in a wooden hut on stilts after a long day of collecting bamboo strips.

???Suddenly, the hut started shaking violently,??? he said, adding that soon after that, he heard a loud roar that sounded like that of a wild beast.

That incident kept him awake the whole night.

The next day, he encountered the creature again but this time at the place he usually gathered bamboo.

???I thought I saw a tree shaking but after a while, I realised there was a huge creature sitting down and rubbing itself against the tree.

???Luckily, the creature did not see me as its back was facing me,??? he said.

Kampung Punjat Sungai Nadik is home to about 30 orang asli families who earn a living by gathering and selling produce collected from the jungle.

Hashim said the expedition was aimed at ascertaining the truth on the existence of the Bigfoot.

???We want to uncover the truth about this creature and also quash any rumour that can scare away visitors to the national park,??? he said, adding that some 124,000 people visited the parks annually.

Hashim said they were also compiling a database on Bigfoot or orang mawas sightings at various spots.

Could this creature actually be a pre-historic animal which had gone extinct over hundreds of thousand years ago?

Based on the Bigfoot-Giganto theory, researchers claimed that Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, Yeti or Mawas was probably a pre-historic giant ape which lived during the Middle of Pleistocene age.

The animal is believed to be living in several parts of Asia including China and South-East Asia, as well as North America during ancient times before facing extinction from the earth some 200,000 to 500,000 years ago.

The question of whether Bigfoot was a pre-historic animal had long been discussed by researchers around the world but until now, they have failed to reach any definite answer to it.

This raised questions whether the Bigfoot sightings by several individuals, including Orang Asli villagers at the 248 million-year-old Endau-Rompin National Park, may be the remnants of the Gigantopithecus Blacki (???Giant Ape??™ in Latin) species.

At the same time, there were similar physical traits between Gigantopithecus and Bigfoot, which according to the Orang Asli folk, the giant animal, which was said to be 10 feet tall, with brown hairy body, was sighted in several jungle spots in Johor.

According to the US-based Bigfoot Field Research Organisation (BFRO), researchers on the animal generally accepted the Bigfoot-Giganto theory.

The BFRO which claims itself as the most credible Bigfoot research organisation on its website, said the issue of Gigantopithecus had caught the interest of many anthropologists and primatologists.

Director Hashim Yusof, when asked on the link between Bigfoot and Gigantopithecus, said that the possibility is there, given the park??™s huge area and age.

???The Endau-Rompin National Park covers 48,906 hectares and is 248 million years old. We only have information on half of the flora and fauna there,??? he said.

Source: The Star (Malaysia)
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2006/1/1/nation/13002732&sec=nation

- AS SEEN ON TV DEPARTMENT -

Englishman Invents Ghost Detector

Troubled by that mysterious bump in the night, creak of the floorboards or unaccountable closing of a door?

Mechanical engineer Steve Watson has the answer -- his spirit sensor.

Steve, 48, of Westburn Avenue, Keighley, has invented a machine which will register ghostly goings-on or supernatural shenanigans invisible to the naked eye.

And when his glass domed device picks up the presence, it gives off a cheery chime and flashes red and blue as an alert.

He has already convinced the patent office that there isn't another like it.

Now he is looking for a manufacturer to help him mass-produce the electro-magnetic sensor.

It sits on the mantle piece like a glass domed clock and is activated by electro-magnetic impulses in the room.

And as well as its supernatural function, it can be used for more down to Earth detection.

It will pick-up levels of electro-magnetic waves from electricity pylons, power lines and mobile phone masts, so it is a health aid.

His brainwave came as he stood musing on the paranormal at his works machine.

Steve, pictured,who has had a number of mysterious encounters, had been contemplating for some time how to produce a more sophisticated ghost finder.

He was not convinced by instruments already on the market, such as the dream catcher.

"The inventor claims it can catch bad dreams as you sleep by placing it above your bed. In the morning the idea is that they can be shaken out of the bedroom window," explained Steve.

"I wanted something more modern and had been working on my idea for some time when I saw a programme on television about inventions called What's the Big Idea, which featured Colin Cramphorn of the Inventions company.

"I contacted him and he put me in touch with Alister Swanwick, of Innovate, in London, who helped to construct and design the sensor.

"When I went back down to London about six months later and saw the prototype, I was really impressed. It's unique and I'm sure it will not just appeal to people interested in the paranormal."

Steve also sees his spirit sensor as an interesting conversation sparker.

"When it goes off, people might argue about what had caused it. Was it a ghost or wasn't it? It's a talking point," he said.

His own strange encounters have included the vision of a mysterious plume in a bedroom and an apparition in Blea Moor Tunnel, on the Settle to Carlisle railway line.

A spokesman for the company Inventions, which helps with the research, said: "Recently it has been postulated that spirits or ghosts cause electro-magnetic disturbance when they are present."

The spirit sensor was a novel yet highly effective means of detecting this energy, he said.

Source: Keighley News
http://www.thisisbradford.co.uk/bradford__district/keighley/news/KEIG_NEWS6.html

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